Library as change agent

Apr 5, 2010, 02.51am IST

The implementation of the Right to Education Act eight years after it was passed by Parliament is part of a process of tapping the 'demographic dividend'. The exultation over the youth bulge in national demographics has recurred in the national development discourse ever since the publication of the findings of Census 2001. At the beginning of the decade, India had a youth (13-35) population of 390 million, which grew at an annual rate of 2.05% to 459 million in 2009. In 2020, India is expected to have 574 million youngsters. To planners, whether in government or private enterprises, this is a valuable resource, provided they are able to use them appropriately.

History shows that youth bulges lead nations to either economic boom or social bust. In 2007, William N Nash, a retired US Army major-general working for the reputed New York-based think tank Council for Foreign Relations, revealed that Afghanistan, Sudan and Congo — countries that have suffered horrors brought on by disastrous and violent conflict — had one thing in common: Very young population. Meanwhile, research by Population Action International brought out evidence that 80% of the civil conflicts that broke out in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s occurred in countries where at least 60% of the population was under 30, and that almost 9 of 10 such youthful countries had autocratic rulers or weak democracies.

India's youth bulge, however, is viewed as a different phenomenon. Even after the failure of universalisation of elementary education and the hopeless chase of the UN's Millennium Development Goals, India, as of 2009, has 333 million literate youth, about 27.4% of its population and 73% of the total youth. The population of literate youth has grown at 2.49% annually, slightly more than that of the 2.08% national rate. So, while the benefits of Right to Education, if implemented honestly, would need another decade to come in, we should, for the present, focus on the mass of youngsters that are already literate, which is large enough.

The National Youth Readership Survey (NYRS), 2009, carried out by the National Council of Applied Economic Research at the behest of the National Book Trust, has created a precedent for probing the deepest recesses of the mind of our youth with a view to gauge the collective intellectual quotient. The primal quest was to understand what our youth read, and how they perceive reading for pure pleasure, which is a cerebrophysical exercise, with the potential to revolutionise society. It was based on the truism that a nation without readers has little claim to world economic relevance.

We have known the centrality of knowledge gathering in national development for a century, but failed to give momentum to the pioneering measures to make reading a widespread activity. It was Lord Curzon, condemned for implementing the 1905 Partition of Bengal, who envisioned India's first public library and had the Imperial Library (now National Library) in Calcutta opened in 1906. The princely State of Baroda under Sayajirao Gaikwad-III introduced the country's first, scientifically-organised, free and open access public library. The architects of India's freedom movement saw an opportunity in emulating this experiment and so the All India Library Conference was organised in major towns to attract youthful followers of the Independence movement to literature.